[plonk]

> No, the AP and the device both have a strong interest to limit the power used: not just to limit interference with other devices inside the home, but also to increase battery life!!

For home routers this is a weak argument. Since most people download more than they upload, you could probably send a weaker signal from mobile devices and drown the air with signal from anything plugged into a wall socket.

> I just don't understand why most posters here assume the worst by default. Most people are nice and want to obey the law.

Maybe it's just where I live, but I don't see that on the road (people risking accidents to gain 30 seconds). People will only follow the law if they think it's worth their inconvenience and lots of people weight this in a bad way.

How many hand-tuned APs does it take to make a whole building lose significant bandwidth? After this the regulation has to become looser so the legal devices can keep working, and it never really gets better.

[smashed]

> you could probably send a weaker signal from mobile devices and drown the air with signal from anything plugged into a wall socket.

How exactly is your mobile device going to ACK those received packets? The mobile device needs to transmit as loudly as the AP for its ack to be received.

Boosting the transmit power higher than your receiving device can transmit leads to very bad wifi links, where the mobile device is receiving a good signal but it's own messages are not received back.

[BenjiWiebe]

You can use different modulation rates to/from a device (this commonly happens). Lower modulation rates give you better SNR, letting your quiet client do slow weak ACKs to loud large chunks of data from the router.